How to Collect Website Feedback in 2020

Let’s begin with a definition of website feedback. It is the set of opinions of website visitors about your website. It doesn’t matter how you collect website feedback, even an opinion of a friend checking up your website can be invaluable and lead to significant improvements. We’ll come back to ways of collecting website feedback later on.

Why is it important to collect and analyze website feedback? Without feedback about your website, you’re blind. You don’t know whether website visitors are satisfied, whether they achieve their goals, how likely they are to return, what stops them from buying etc. When you know it, you can work on improvements to satisfy visitors better and make them more likely to buy. And for many businesses, a well-converting website is the key to success.

Benefits of collecting website feedback

Why should you bother to collect website feedback? Here are 5 most important benefits of collecting website feedback.

Get an overview how people assess your website

Your website is often the most important touchpoint between a potential customer and your company. You want the website to present your company in a certain way and to make a certain impression. Does it work? You don’t know until you collect feedback from visitors.

Find and fix broken elements

Even when your website is simple, there are still links, buttons and other elements that can break down without you noticing. Checking it manually or using software is not effective – you can’t spend so much time doing it and software won’t show all problems (example: a button works as intended but is difficult to see on a certain version of one browser). So encourage visitors to let you know when something doesn’t work as expected and quickly fix it to improve their website experience and increase conversion rates.

Collect ideas for improvements

Discover what visitors would like to see improved on the website to adjust the website to their needs and expectations. What’s important and useful, users are likely to share not only their thoughts on the design of your website but also about your pricing strategy, marketing actions etc. Their out of the box ideas can give you great tips to consider while preparing a marketing plan or product roadmap.

Learn why visitors are not converting and increase sales

There are hundreds of reasons that might be stopping visitors from converting. Maybe they want to continue research and look for alternatives, a registration form can be too long, maybe you don’t offer payment methods they need? You don’t know until you ask visitors who decide not to buy. The best way to collect their feedback is to run an exit survey on pages crucial for conversion, like signup page or shopping cart. It can turn out that you’re losing money because of something easy to fix, like too complex form on a checkout.

Tip: you can also run post-purchase surveys to ask new customers what almost stopped from buying. Probably the same issues detracted many potential customers from buying. Take a look at this case study to learn how Colorescience used post-purchase surveys to improve purchase path.

See how people assess changes on the website

Implementing changes on the website is a difficult task that can lead to serious problems. The more you change the higher the risk. Usually, you check stats in Google Analytics to see if and how changes affected bounce rate, exit rate, and average time spent on page. But is it enough? Not really. You don’t know why changes led to certain changes. That’s why it’s smart to use session recordings or website usability testing tools to learn more about visitors’ behavior. If you combine such data with answers given to a website survey, you’ll clearly see why changes brought certain results and what you can do to achieve even better results.

How to collect website feedback

The best way to collect website feedback is to survey or talk to visitors when they are browsing the website. Why? Because their experience is fresh and they are engaged so they are more likely to share their thoughts. There are 3 popular methods of collecting website feedback from visitors while they are browsing.

Website surveys

Website surveys are conducted using unobtrusive widgets like the sample one below. Their main advantages include high response rates (top performer of Survicate achieves response rates close to 60%) and the possibility of showing different surveys to different groups of website visitors. It allows you to ask only relevant questions adjusted to the context of the user. Learn more about website surveys here.

Website intercept surveys

A similar, but less advanced way of collecting website feedback than website surveys. Usually, an invitation to taking a survey appears when you enter a website. When you agree, a long survey will open in a new window when you are about to leave the website. Take a look at the comparison of website surveys and intercept surveys.

Live chat

the main purpose of live chat software is to help customers but talking to visitors is also a great way of collecting website feedback. Visitors like sharing their thoughts when talking to a live person. There’s just one catch: you need to create information flows between support and marketing team to make feedback collected during conversations useful and actionable.

On the top of that, you can employ additional techniques to collect feedback from people who visit your website. There are two basic techniques you should consider using if you want to make sure no website feedback is unnoticed by you.

Social listening

We’re living in an era of social media. People share everything, including their opinions about websites they visit. Sometimes they prefer to tweet that your website causes them problems or than to let you know via website survey widget, live chat, or email. So take a close a look at social media to be able to react when people complain about your website (or praise it but it doesn’t happen so often).

Email surveys

Your customers can be a great source of insights about your website. They came all the way from finding you to making a purchase, which means a lot of interactions with your website. While you can use website surveys to run post-purchase surveys you can also consider running email surveys. How do they work? You can embed a short survey in an email and people need to do just one click to give an answer. When a person answers (i.e. clicks a link) a new tab opens in their browser. You can place there a ‘Thank you’ message or the next question.

Tip: take a look at this guide to email surveys to learn more about them and find out how to make the most of them.

Key takeaways

Let’s briefly sum up what you learned from this article.

Website feedback can come in many forms

Website feedback will help you improve your website and increase online sales

There are two basic ways of collecting website feedback:

when visitors are browsing your website. Techniques you can use: website surveys, intercept surveys, live chat

after people leave the website. Techniques you can use: social listening and email surveys

on the top of that, you can use usability tests to collect website feedback from testers. Just remember that testers are not your real users so their attitude and ideas can vary from those of your users.

Equipped with this knowledge, you can choose the most suitable technique for collecting website feedback and test for yourself to see what results it brings. What you can consider is using tools of multiple functions to minimize the number of needed tools. For example, with Survicate you can run bot website surveys and email surveys and manage them within one dashboard. Happy collecting feedback!

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